Salesforce Q2 Earnings Preview: 5 Things To Know

AI’s impact on SaaS, progress on Salesforce’s AI sales and customer reaction to pricing changes are potential topics on Wednesday’s call.

Software as a Service in the artificial intelligence era. Progress on Salesforce’s AI sales. And customer reaction to pricing changes.

These are some of the hot-button topics expected to come up Wednesday when the San Francisco-based CRM vendor reports results for the second quarter of its 2026 fiscal year on Wednesday. The quarter ended July 31.

Salesforce has about 12,000 channel partners worldwide and has invested in equipping partners for AI’s proliferation, including the vendor’s Agentforce for Partner Community AI agent embedded in its Partner Community portal.

Salesforce Second Quarter

The agent has handled more than 19,000 requests, averaged 1,400 conversations per week and engaged with 120,000 monthly Partner Community users, according to the vendor. More than 272,000 consultants at Salesforce partners have completed AI certifications and built more than 18,000 agents.

Salesforce’s quarterly results could be a bellwether of sorts for enterprise spending on IT and AI projects for channel partners. Vendors for a variety of technologies that reported earnings in recent days have pointed to AI enthusiasm lifting their sales. That includes data products by Snowflake, AI servers by Dell Technologies and AI chips by Nvidia.

Here’s more of what the channel needs to know heading into Salesforce’s second fiscal quarter results.

AI Eats Software

Analysts on Wednesday’s call will likely look for signs of how the software application market is navigating existential threats of the AI era.

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella has indicated that AI agents threaten the applications powered by multirepository create, read, update and delete (CRUD) databases.

Melius Research rang the alarm bells in an August report comparing the impact of AI on Salesforce, Atlassian and other SaaS vendors to how Amazon Web Services and cloud lowered the stock prices of Dell, HP Inc., IBM and other IT hardware makers.

Hardware vendors were excluded from the technology shift and saw enterprise customers move large portions of workloads to cloud providers that even procured their own server and storage gear, according to the Melius report. Using Dell as an example, the vendor had to buy up services, software and storage assets to diversify in the 2010s and even go private in 2013, re-emerging with a better business in 2018, according to Melius.

In the AI era, startups and cloud giants can create applications to compete quickly and potently against SaaS giants. Melius predicted that AI will lower seat growth first in sales, marketing, creative and human resources departments.

“Bottom Line: It can get worse for SaaS players like Adobe, Salesforce, Workday etc.—and see value continuing to shift toward infrastructure winners like Microsoft and Oracle,” according to the report.

AI, Cloud Product Updates

Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff and his team will likely tout a variety of product milestones on Wednesday’s call—with listeners looking for progress on the AI front and in the core cloud offers.

Since the prior quarterly earnings update from the vendor, Salesforce has released the third version of its Agentforce AI agent development platform with native support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) and a new Agentforce Command Center.

The vendor has also released Agentforce for Net Zero Cloud for sustainability insight and Agentforce for Public Sector with capabilities aimed at government agencies. And its MuleSoft integration platform used by solution providers has been updated to support the the MCP and Agent2Agent protocols plus enable more natural language prompting.

Agentforce has handled more than 1 million support requests for the vendor and should hit $50 million in annual cost savings by the end of Salesforce’s fiscal year in one example of its capabilities, according to the vendor.

Salesforce executives have maintained that AI won’t bring a material amount of revenue in this fiscal year, with many users still in trial phase and readying their data for AI.

Salesforce channel partners have struggled to get Agentforce deals done at the high end, according to a KeyBanc report Thursday. Retail and technology are among the industries seeing the biggest Agentforce adoption, along with SMBs. New customers have appeared more interested in Agentforce than renewing customers.

Partners saw business from the core cloud product decelerate sequentially and multipoint year over year, according to KeyBanc. Partners’ salespeople hit their quotas through upsells and cross-sells more so than sales of Agentforce.

“We hope to see recovering data points for underlying customer spend, especially since we’ve heard anecdotes of a 6% price increase for renewing cohorts,” according to KeyBanc.

Acquisition Progress

Salesforce is expected to close on its $8 billion purchase of data platform provider Informatica early next year, and analysts might have questions not only on the emerging cross-selling and upselling potential with the combined company, but Salesforce’s acquisition strategy looking ahead.

Even while Salesforce works on closing the Informatica deal, the vendor closed on two other purchases with a third expected to close in the third fiscal quarter.

Salesforce completed the purchase of AI-powered sales prospecting platform Bluebirds on Aug. 13 with plans to integrate the company into its Sales Cloud and Agentforce offers. The vendor completed the purchase of Waii, which translates plain-language questions into complex, production-ready SQL queries. Salesforce plans to integrate Waii into Data Cloud.

The acquisition of Regrello, an AI-native complex business process automation vendor, should close in the third quarter, bringing more agentic capabilities to Agentforce and Slack, according to Salesforce.

Pricing Changes

Wednesday’s call could offer insight into how customers are responding to the various pricingmodels available for AI plus price increases by Salesforce.

A quarter has passed since Salesforce introduced an option for consumption-based Flex Credits meant to better align payment for the Agentforce AI platform with business outcomes. In May, alongside Flex Credits, Salesforce unveiled new Agentforce user licenses and add-ons with an option for payment per user, per month for unlimited agent use. Aug. 1 also marked the start to a 6 percent average price increase to a variety of products.

Earlier this month, Salesforce expanded payment options for Agentforce to include pay-as-you-go with no up-front commitment, a pre-commitment option for favorable pricing and monthly Flex Credit option, and a pre-purchase option where users save the most.

Melius’ August report raised a theory that SaaS vendors including Salesforce have coasted on growth through price increases at a larger rate than inflation plus seat sprawl from enterprises overhiring remote workers during the pandemic.

SaaS inflation in 2024 rose about 13 percent compared with consumer inflation growing 2.9 percent, according to the report. SaaS spend per employee grew more than 50 percent from 2022 to 2024. The investment firm even advocated that SaaS vendors consider price cuts to maintain seat counts.

An August report by KeyBanc on Salesforce rival HubSpot said that channel partner surveys show HubSpot winning “consistently in head-to-head evaluations even as Salesforce continues to discount heavily.”

Salesforce Customer Cyberattacks

Although Salesforce has maintained that cybersecurity attacks reported against its customers in recent weeks is not due to the company itself getting compromised or “any known vulnerability in our platform,” the subject could come up during Wednesday’s call.

The Google Threat Intelligence Group identified campaigns designed to compromise organizations’ Salesforce instances—including at Google itself—for large-scale data theft and subsequent extortion, with the attacks linked to a threat group known as ShinyHunters.

Google Threat Intelligence Group has since posted updates on the attacks, noting that the threat actor is targeting Salesforce customer instances through compromised OAuth tokens associated with the Salesloft Drift third-party application.

On Aug. 20 Salesloft and Salesforce revoked all active access and refresh tokens with the Drift application and Salesforce removed Drift from the Salesforce AppExchange until further notice.

On Thursday, Google said that the compromise isn’t exclusive to the Salesforce integration with Salesloft Drift, advising all Salesloft customers to treat any authentication tokens stored in or connected to the Drift platform as potentially compromised.